Management 7.0

You might have heard of management 3.0 or was it 4.0 !?! … in these inflationary times, I just have to bring you the latest.

The trigger for this post was the panel discussion at India Agile Week (IAW), 2014 event held in Bangalore last week. I was part of the panel discussions, sharing space (and the mike) with Mr . Tathagat Verma (aka TV), Mr Manish Mishra and Mr Raj Stanley.

We discussed a variety of topics and issues. The exchange was interesting and informative. At some point, the role of managers came up and TV remarked that managers are rewarded for doing (more of) the same tasks/activities. They do not have an incentive to innovate.

TV could not have put it better. This is how it is. This view of the manager’s role is so trite, that such a mode of working and the resulting work environment is seldom questioned, let alone overturned. Nevertheless a more mature view of management (and one that Scrum espouses) is that “Managers are not there to make the inevitable happen”. A well- written explanation of the manager’s role is at http://www.goodagile.com and much material on related ideas can be gleaned from http://www.stevedenning.com

At the conference, there was a comment/question about the lack of conclusive answers as to how team appraisals can be conducted as well as redefining the role of managers . In such a case, due consideration must be given to long-term planning and changes needed in “agile”.

Lack of time precluded a detailed explication. However, the Scrum community has had some well- formed answers to these Questions for sometime. Briefly, appraisals are team based (with 360 degree feedback) with the manager providing a conducive environment for self-organised teams to flourish. Long- term planning is done based on an aggregation of current team capacity to deliver working software increments. Each of these can be the topic of a post in itself, and I intend to share my views and information in the coming weeks.

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Hmmm… I think it is followed in a few places. But in a way you are right, that it is not done properly. Everyone needs some preperation to take part in a 360 feedback session. It is a good idea, as multiple views are taken into account.

Nice to see you blogging again. Do this more often. And nice links to management too. Am sharing with another friend who is gung ho on management unlike me! Let us have a coffee together soon. It has been a long time.

Srini, as always, it was nice to exchange thoughts with you, though we will have to defer the on-stage sparring for another day…

Off late, I have been thinking that the best way to do performance appraisal might actually be broken down into two small activities – a peer feedback session and a sharing the spoils session. In the feedback session, every team member gives feedback to one another. If the team is not yet mature enough to handle an open feedback, then they could share feedback to each other anonymously, but in an ideal world, the feedback is given by everyone to everyone else in an open setting. In fact, I did use this once, back in 2004-05 timeframe with my management team and I think it was fabulous (though the objective was to improve out functioning as the management team and not to give an appraisal in open). The initial feedback started out with lots of sugarcoats, but with some intelligent facilitation, we eventually got better and the rest of the session got some very honest (rather, brutally honest) and actionable feedback, especially to one or two managers who were not perceived as equally strong team players by rest of the managers. It will be interesting to see how a self-organizing agile team handles a social feedback session such as this.

The second part is how to share the spoils, or whatever is left of it! Perhaps the best way will be to tell the team how much $$$s they have and then let them decide how do want to share it – the only condition being that everyone else must know how much you are going to take home! Again, this is not something radically new, but in a self-organizing team, what else would be the most fair way to accomplish this? Perhaps this $$$s itself could be divvied up per sprint (or at least per release) and let the team use its collective judgment?

Apologies for such a late response. I agree (for a change!?!) completly with what you write. I’m inclined to say that the sort of session you describe above should be standard practice.
Only a small technicality, occasionally a single clearly superior/inferior performer in the team, can get rewarded disproporionately or feel (rightly or wrongly) unfairly treated and then future team-work may suffer. We need better facilitation capabilities for managers/SMs !

ScrumCoach

A development coach, mostly teaching Scrum and TDD. I've 18 years of s/w dev experience, some of it brilliant, a good bit mind-numbing, most of it pedestrian and even a little bit disastrous. I've been a programmer, analysts, tester, project manager and worked in various countries with all sorts of people (or is that 'resources'?)